The New Deal & Modern American Conservatism: A Defining Rivalry

121 Pages·2013·1.219 MB·English

by  Gordon Lloyd, David Davenport

The New Deal & Modern
American Conservatism
A Defining Rivalry
Gordon Lloyd and
David Davenport
H O O V E R   I N S T I T U T I O N   P R E S S
STaNfORd  UNIVERSITy      STaNfORd,  calIfORNIa
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The New Deal & Modern
American Conservatism
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The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, founded 
at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on 
to become the thirty-first president of the United States, is an 
interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic 
and international affairs. The views expressed in its publications 
are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the 
views of the staff, officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover 
Institution.
www.hoover.org
Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 642
Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University,
Stanford, California 94305-6010
Copyright © 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University
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ISBN: 978-0-8179-1684-8 (cloth. : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-0-8179-1686-2 (e-book)
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CONTENTS
Preface vii
1 | The New Deal and the Origin
of Modern American Conservatism 1
2 | Liberty versus Equality 19
3 | Limited Government versus Expansive Government  39
4 | Constitutional Conservatism versus
Liberal Reinterpretation 61
5 | The 2012 Election and the Future of Conservatism 83
About the Authors 99
Index 101
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PREFACE
In the aftermath of the 2012 presidential election, there is almost a
frenzy to explain what went wrong with Republicans and what con-
servatives must do to be a viable part of the national conversation.
“Whither conservatism?” seems to be the political question of the
day. Our answer is: Go back to come back. History often contains
signposts for the way forward, and we think that is most certainly
the case here.
The particular historical trail we propose to travel in this book
started when we taught a course to public policy graduate stu-
dents on “The Roots of the American Order.” We concluded that
the American republic was defined and established in three crises
during its history: (1) the Founding crisis, (2) the Civil War crisis,
and (3) the Great Depression and New Deal crisis. We challenged
students to understand what a crisis is, not from secondary sources
but from the perspective of those who lived and led the way through
it. Each of these crises defined or redefined the very nature of the
American republic.
The more we studied the third crisis—the Great Depression
and the New Deal of the 1930s—the more we realized it had estab-
lished the frame for American domestic policy and the ongoing
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viii Preface
debate between progressives and conservatives today. The debates
between Franklin Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover in the 1930s sound
very much like the campaign rhetoric of liberals and conservatives
in 2012. Roosevelt’s New Deal established the infrastructure on
which President Obama and the Democrats are still building and
expanding government. And Herbert Hoover articulated the core
principles of modern American conservatism that resonate today.
As two colleagues who have written twenty-five or so op-eds
together in recent years, and who taught these ideas on the fac-
ulty of the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, we
decided it might be valuable to write this book to illuminate this
historic frame. Before collaborating on this book, Gordon Lloyd
had edited a volume that used original speeches and documents to
create the Hoover-Roosevelt debate that never really occurred face
to face: The Two Faces of Liberalism: How the Hoover-Roosevelt 
Debate Shapes the 21st Century (M & M Scrivener Press, 2006). More
recently, we made a fuller exploration of Herbert Hoover’s record
as a conservative, both before and during the New Deal, in coau-
thoring a chapter, “The Two Phases of Herbert Hoover’s Constitu-
tional Conservatism.” This will appear in a book edited by Joseph
Postell and Johnathan O’Neill, Toward an American Conservatism: 
Constitutional Conservatism during the Progressive Era, to be pub-
lished by Palgrave McMillan in fall 2013.
In this book we go back again to the 1930s, but with the express
purpose of coming back to public policy today. We seek to recap-
ture a debate between Roosevelt and Hoover that has been lost,
but which is timely today. In the name of addressing an economic
emergency, an earlier generation was willing to trade in some of
its liberty and reshape the republic on a temporary basis. But that
emergency response never went away. Instead, it became what we
call today “the new normal,” a newly reshaped welfare state from
which we continue to work, and to which we continue to add.
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Preface ix
Chapter 1 reaches back to establish the New Deal frame and
Herbert Hoover’s response. Chapter 5 reaches forward to see where
the debate might go from here, especially for conservatism. In the
intervening chapters, 2 through 4, we take up what we see as the three
pivotal issues, laying out the essence of the progressive-c onservative
debate between Hoover and Roosevelt in the 1930s in the first half
of each chapter, then illustrating how those issues remain current
in public policy today.
Our thanks to those who have assisted in our work on these
Hoover-Roosevelt projects, including both the book chapter and
this book: Tom Church and Carson Bruno, former Pepperdine stu-
dents who are now at the Hoover Institution, and Dana O’Neill.
And thanks also to Pepperdine graduate students Michael Crouch
and Anthony Miller, who assisted in tracking down coverage of the
fate of American conservatism.
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